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Vertically Aligned Carbon NanoTube Arrays (Vanta) are engineered in a lab and painstakingly deposited onto a substrate through a chemical vapor deposition process. The dense forest of tubes traps over 99.96 percent of visible light as well as ultraviolet and infrared radiation. The photons bounce around in the maze of nanotubes until they dissipate as thermal energy.
...Vantablack seems like an incredible resource for military applications, such as enhancing stealth aircraft or camouflaging soldiers. However, the nanotubes are so delicate that exposing them to touch, impact or even a gentle breeze would damage the material and likely ruin the illusion.
Vantablack is best suited to enclosed, protected environments like satellites and telescopes. If applied to the internal components of a telescope the material would reduce atmospheric distortion and light refraction from polished lenses, providing higher-definition images. Notably, Vantablack is an excellent coating for the visual systems within self-driving cars. Surrey NanoSystems’ Chief Technical Officer Ben Jensen sees an incredible opportunity for the product in the automated car market. “If you’re driving in low sunlight and it blinds the vision system, you come into an unsafe situation. Anything you can do with these technologies where you can protect and improve stray light suppression within the vision system is a real benefit,” noted Jensen during an interview with Tech Times.
In addition to being known for his over-sized installations (including the giant reflective Cloud Gate “bean” in Chicago), Kapoor made headlines in 2016 when he secured the exclusive artistic rights to a physics-defying material called Vantablack. Developed by a British company called Surrey NanoSystems, the material is able to trap photons in-between lab-grown carbon nanotubes, which bounce around until they’re eventually absorbed. Just a scant 0.035 percent of visible light is reflected by an object covered in Vantablack, making it impossible to see any curves or contours—or to accurately gauge the depth of a hole if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
Descent Into Limbo debuted years before Vantablack was announced to the public, and was instead created using a dark paint that produces the same depthless, black hole effect. For at least one hapless art lover, it seems that was enough.